Tag Archives: banks

A good article was released on the NYT today highlighting an elongated attack into up to 100 banks where methods were learned by attackers, and then exploited. What is interesting here is that the attackers studied the banks own processes and then customized their behaviors accordingly.

It would be difficult to imagine these campaigns to succeed for such a long period as occurred if the malware was detected (which is possible with interval security process studies), and or the bank processes were re-examined by risk officers for activity within the dollar range thresholds. It is typical for data to be slowly “dripped” out of networks to stay below range (hence when signatures are essentially worthless as a preventive/detective tool), and thus similar fraud behavior is needed at the human/software process level.

I look forward to the report to analyze the campaign and share any possible learnings beyond this surface article. Two highlights of the NYT article jump to me, include:

Kaspersky Lab says it has seen evidence of $300 million in theft from clients, and believes the total could be triple that. But that projection is impossible to verify because the thefts were limited to $10 million a transaction, though some banks were hit several times. In many cases the hauls were more modest, presumably to avoid setting off alarms.

The hackers’ success rate was impressive. One Kaspersky client lost $7.3 million through A.T.M. withdrawals alone, the firm says in its report. Another lost $10 million from the exploitation of its accounting system. In some cases, transfers were run through the system operated by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift, which banks use to transfer funds across borders. It has long been a target for hackers — and long been monitored by intelligence agencies.